Survey Results: South Sudan tops list of countries most likely to see mass killing in 2018

South Sudan is the country most likely to see an onset of mass killing in 2018, according to participants in the Early Warning Project’s most recent public wiki survey. The pairwise wiki survey is a “wisdom of the crowds” method in which participants are asked to select which country has a higher risk of a new episode of mass killing when presented a series of head-to-head match-ups. The survey ran in December 2017 and included 163 countries. Following South Sudan at the top of the list are Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Myanmar/Burma, Yemen, and Central African Republic (CAR).

Last year the top countries were Central African Republic, South Sudan, Libya, Syria, and Sudan.

The Early Warning Project produces risk assessments of the potential for mass atrocities around the world by combining state-of-the-art quantitative and qualitative analysis. The project aims to give governments, advocacy groups, and at-risk societies earlier and more reliable warning, and thus more opportunity to take action, before such killings occur. Along with the statistical risk assessments and public opinion pool, we present the wiki survey results to policymakers in the US and abroad, NGOs, and researchers to help them prioritize prevention efforts and further develop the crowd forecasting field. The results from our annual wiki survey will inform the selection of cases and countries we track in real time with our Opinion Pool throughout 2018.

The results are mapped above. The darker the shade of red, the greater the risk that a new episode of mass killing will begin in 2018 (according to our survey’s respondents).